Not wanting to let such a disastrous (albeit admittedly impressive) international incident pass with the perpetrators getting nothing more than a slap on the wrist, the Federal Communications Commission recommended that WXDJ-FM, the radio station, be fined a hefty $4,000, according to the Chicago Tribune.But Ballen says he is pleased with the way the situation was handled by 911 and law enforcement but he says prank calls hurt everyone. He adds, "We are living in troubled times especially here in Conway and police do not need to be walking up and down Walmart looking for something that doesn't exist."Īnd he is hopeful Horry County Police can use surveillance photos, interviews and swabbed DNA from the pay phone the call was made from to track down the caller. Upon finding out that he had been fooled, Castro reportedly "sprayed South Florida with a barrage of unprintable expletives" (via the Washington Times). Their conversation went on for approximately four minutes before one of the DJs exclaimed, "Are you satisfied with you have done on the island, assassin?" Per BBC News, the city of Miami had a largely "anti-Castro" population of Cuban expatriates at the time.
While live on air, the two radio presenters asked Castro for assistance in looking for a missing briefcase that allegedly contained important and confidential information, reports the Washington Times. As Rutgers University associate professor Keith Hampton acknowledged, "The advent of caller ID has certainly done a lot to reduce response rates for things like surveys."Īfter managing to trick four Cuban officials into believing that they were actually Chavez and an official of the Venezuelan government, Santos and Ferrero were able to talk to Castro over the telephone. Data-gathering, for example, became tougher, as anyone who'd see an unknown number calling would simply opt not to answer (via The Atlantic). While traditional prank calling was certainly affected by the introduction of Caller ID, per the Boston Globe, it also affected how telephone users responded to legitimate calls from unfamiliar numbers. Apart from the popularity boost that any new piece of technology typically enjoys, this sharp increase in Caller ID subscribers is said to have been brought about by cordless phones that incorporated Caller ID being released into the market, as well as the public's desire to be able to identify "calls from anywhere in the United States instead of just local calls."
Rhinoceros and Miss Elephant, who are too big to answer calls, over the wire anyhow."Īccording to a 1997 article from the New York Times, over a million telephone owners across the mid-Atlantic region availed Caller ID from Bell Atlantic from mid-1995 to mid-1996. The only animals which escaped attention during the day were Mr. Fox, Miss Wolf and the Widow Campbell." Per the April 4, 1920, article of the Los Angeles Times: "Several people even were trying to locate certains Miss Cats.
In another instance, Los Angeles' Selig Zoo reportedly received a menagerie of prank calls on April 1, asking for "Dr. Presumably, the 12 officers they sent there could only shake their heads when they reached the location and realized that it was actually another police station. One example was in the April 1 issue of the Modesto Evening News: The San Francisco police station received an urgent phone call that asked them to "rush the wagon" to a certain address. Some particularly interesting reports of April Fool's prank calls from 1920 were documented by the The Museum of Hoaxes. Numerous accounts exist of various types of telephone trickery pulled on this particularly jovial day, many of which made it to the local news.
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